Checking Out What's Around

Dan: http://keepitonthedl.wordpress.com/

Dan posted a great comment on a Spike TV program that pitted a gladiator against an Apache warrior. I think it shows just how absurd Western culture sometimes is that this was both aired and avidly watched. In the end, it represents to me some of the deepest and most abiding difficulties that Westerners have when interacting with other cultures.

Haley: http://nativelit.motime.com/

Haley had some great things to say about The Truth About Stories. I found I agreed with much of what she said, especially her comments about how King ends his chapters. We need to think about how stories affect our lives. After all, everything we have ever known is a story that tells us how our world works. If we're believing stories that lead to injustice, hate, and pain, why do we continue to listen to them?

http://english266ailac.blogspot.com/

Jennifer talked about one of Joy Harjo's poems, and what she said about a purpose for everything really struck me. I think this is at the heart of many American Indian traditions, which value life and seek to protect and preserve it as much as possible. We all have a purpose, although what it is may often seem unclear. More often that not, we need to sit back a moment and just listen to the world speak to us to hear what that purpose is.

We Shall Remain

I watched the first episode of We Shall Remain tonight. It was an account of the early contact between Wampanoag Indians and the colonists at Plymouth. The documentary covered from the first contact in 1620 up until the 1680's after the close of King Philip's War.
Rather than a normal documentary, We Shall Remain is set up more like a movie interspersed with director commentary. Key events in the history are reenacted, and the intervening time is covered by a variety of scholarly and American Indian sources. The American Indians dressed as traditional Wampanoag and also spoke the Wampanoag language with English subtitles. Overall, the documentary was extraordinarily well done and gave a fascinating account of the evolving nature of European/American Indian relationships in the Early Colonial Period.
The most powerful moment was the explanation of how the English treated the Wampanoag chief Metacom (King Philip) after he had lost his war against them. The English executed Metacom and then left his head on a spike in Plymouth for 20 years as a warning to other American Indian tribes. It's difficult to comprehend how the English could accuse American Indians of barbarism when they seem to have cornered the market on it.

Going Home

I found Qwo-Li's poem really interesting because it seems to so succinctly describe his feelings and frustrations about the removal. It is an event that has not ever been treated as the monstrosity that it was. We seem too ready to just let the problems of the past fade away, rather than accepting that they happened and dealing with their aftermath.
In class, some have questioned Qwo-Li's anger, but I think it is more healthy to speak as you feel, rather than leave your rage bottled up. Besides that, he is rightly angry. The Trail of Tears and the other injustices perpetrated by European Americans are simply wrong. There is no way to justify the forced removal of thousands of people (Which our country did). Any more than there is a way to justify the enslavement of millions of fellow human beings (Which our country also did). We need to look at our country's history and try and understand the wrongs done, rather than just ignore or try to rationalize them.

Violating Gender Norms

If anyone was interested by the comments I made in class about homophobia and transgressing gender norms, the article I referred to was called "Because That's What We Do To Faggots" by Riki Wilchins. I read it in an anthology on writing, but I'm sure it's on the web somewhere.
It brings up some interesting points about what people really fear about gay men and women. After all, if we don't think they're going to make us gay, what is so dangerous or scary about them? What can't they live their lives in peace?

Smoke Signals

In my ENG 375 course, we watched Smoke Signals, a movie that Sherman Alexie wrote. The movie has a lot of the same features as Absolutely True Diary: a focus on humor, problems with alcoholism, and trying to establish an identity as a person. The performances are very good all around, and the movie is touching.
I also noticed some aspects of the storytelling that we've been discussing in relationship with American Indians. Many different narratives from different times are interwoven seamlessly into the movie. Past and present shift as the story determines they need to. Also, there is a lot of flexibility about the "truth" of stories. One of the characters is constantly telling stories, many of them false, but they always help get a point across that needs to be made. Sometimes, truth, in the universal sense, trumps truth, in the factual sense. There is also a strong theme of metaphor used to help people make sense of their worlds. All in all, it's interesting to see American Indian storytelling on the big screen and compare it to what we get from Western filmmakers.

For Those Who Are Interested...

In my adolescent lit. class, Dr. Coats mentioned a web site called Oyate that give an American Indian perspective on portrayals of American Indians in children's and young adult books. The site has a lot of good stuff on it, especially the Watch list. The Watch list is a list of books that have inaccurate or unfair portrayals of American Indians in them. Books on the list range from Indian in the Cupboard to The Sign of the Beaver. Accompanying each book on the list is an explanation of the problems with the portrayal of American Indians. As a teacher, I think its really helpful to have a list of books that hinder my students' understanding of American Indians today. I'm glad that this site is out there.

Real Control

In the first place, I'd like to say that I've always found the idea of coercive population control antithetical to the concept that people are born with natural rights. That being said, it was nice to have someone outside of my tradition come in and argue about other issues that population control brings up (And the biases it reveals, especially the quote from Paul Ehrlich at the end of the article).
On a larger note, I felt that this piece was a perfect complement to those of Allen and LaDuke. Allen positions indigenous feminism as an historical tradition, one that drove many American Indian cultures. She reaches all the way into the present day, but does not spend so much time in defining what battles are being fought. Both LaDuke and Smith pick up the task and carry it forward. I see Smith's Rape of the Land as a laying out of the war, while LaDuke constructs one particular battlefield where the conflict is being waged. The complex nature of these conflicts reflects the complex world that we now live in. No longer is it just a fight between American Indians and the government, but also against Multinational Corporations and a kind of extreme yuppie environmentalism. In their own way, they are even more destructive than the government, especially the environmentalists. As Smith pointed out, the environmentalists seem to have no place in nature for American Indians to inhabit. Nature should be pristine(Read: NO PEOPLE). In the end, the goals are the same, though the methods may have become more sophisticated.
I think it is a testament to the power and ability of American Indian women that they are such effective spokespeople for their way of life. Hopefully, their efforts can create a new age of American Indian prosperity and peace.

The Sacred Hoop

The most important aspect of The Sacred Hoop for me is its unapologetic uplifting of American Indian culture and custom. Allen's goal with the book is to set out for her audience a sampling of the ideas that drive American Indian culture. She does this by repeatedly calling up concurring examples from the many tribes and traditions she is familiar with. She also spends a substantial amount of time explaining how American Indian understandings of the world conflict and contradict the Western view. She speaks of the power of women in their tribes and how the idea power itself is constructed differently. She speaks of how contemporary American Indian writers use their culture to fuel their narratives, as opposed to the Western basis that everyone else clings to. She complicates ideas of myth, ceremony, and religion, calling into question the Western tradition of reasonableness and primitiveness.
Throughout her essays, she tenaciously defends the American Indian tradition and uses that lens to show the shortcomings, peculiarities, and destructive urges that have come from a Western dominated world. Must we live in a world where power is held and used punitively against those who do not conform? Where is the boundary between what is real and not real? Fiction and fact? The key is not that these questions are answered, but how they are answered. Only when Westerners understand and respect the fundamental differences in thought can they hope to appreciate the full depth and complexity of the American Indian cultural tradition. And The Sacred Hoop is a great place to begin that quest. Allen is eloquent and always interesting, her examples and arguments are lucid and well thought out. Most importantly, what she says is true and needs to be heard.

Well, of course it'sThe Last of the Mohicans

I titled this post this way because I've been doing some research on the Mohicans in James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans. Apparently, the Mohicans were not actually a tribe of American Indians. Thus, the book is quite rightly about the last of the Mohicans because the Mohicans never existed in the first place.
The name Mohican could be coming from either the tribe Mohegans or Mahicans. Likely, Cooper was using Mahicans as his referent because one of his characters is named after a famous Mahican chief.
I thought this would be an interesting way to think about Cooper's novel, as tied up as it is with the idea of the disappearing Indian. Proper naming would imply proper understanding of the American Indian as a respected part of the world. As the Euro Americans believed neither, we can see how Cooper may have had a specific rhetorical choice behind his creating the "Mohican" people.

Books to Watch Out For

While doing my research for my Apache presentation, I found a young adult book to look out for about the Apache. The book is called Apache: Girl Warrior by Tanya Landman. It's about a young Apache girl growing up in the 19th century. I say watch out for it because it subscribes to the myth of the dying Indian, and I hope that from my presentation you got that the Apache are still alive and very strong. We don't need books that portray American Indians as some kind of throwback that has since disappeared from the face of the earth. Rather, we need books that celebrate the diverse traditions and cultures that still exist today. If you want to read more about Apache: Girl Warrior, you can find it at this link.

http://americanindiansinchildrensliterature.blogspot.com/2008/06/slapin-review-of-landmans-apachie-girl.html

Apache (Enemy)

I think it's interesting that what we call most Native American groups is not necessarily what they call themselves. For example, in my research of the Apache for my presentaion, I found out that the Apache don't call themselves Apache. Apache is actually a word that means enemy, and it was used by another tribe to describe the Apache to the Spanish.
The Spanish never cared to correct the mistake or to ask the Apache what they called themselves, and for that matter, neither did anybody else. I think this problem with naming is reflective of the whole complex of problems that plague relationships between American Indians and the West. The West has failed to listen, and even when we have listened, we usually get it wrong.

Rhetorics of Survivance

Before I get into talking about Powell's discussion of Winnemuca, Picotte, Eastman, I just want to comment on how interesting it is reading Powell's work. I really like the way she intersperses small bits of narrative in between parts of her essays to help the reader stop and think a moment about what she has said. I also like the way she calls everyone "folks", instead of people, communities, or whatever else. Coming from the country myself, it has so much more of a relaxed and polite feel. Finally, I enjoy the way she points out that everything is just a story, regardless of the esteem in which we hold it. She's right, and I hope that we take that point with us and share it with others.
As to her discussion of these early American Indian authors, I find that they helped me to better understand the position that American Indians found themselves in in the last century. Using Powell's example, I tried using the same perspective to understand the pressures all minorities were under when looking at the writings of some early American female authors. I found similar patterns, with the authors unable to completely articulate their points, but still finding rhetorical contact zones through which they could successfully establish their own indenpendent identity through the dominant rhetoric. It was helpful having Powell's examples to follow, and I'm very thankful because she made one of my midterms a lot easier.

From Nosing Around a Bit

I was fascinated to find out that there is fantasy fiction out there being written by American Indian authors. Especially since the books can be read as analogical to the relationship between Americans and American Indians. To me as a teacher, that gives me a way to help students see the conflicts between American and American Indians in a fresh light, one untainted by years of cultural inculcation.
Another thing that caught my eye was the use of the epithet redskin for American Indians. I noted in my response to that post that American Indians have also been called savages and Tawnies. I wander if there is a changing lexicon of racial epithets as different Western understandings of American Indians come into vogue?

American Indians and Children's Lit.

What I've found in Debbie Reese's blogs is a profound sense of indignation and anger about the way Indians are portrayed in children's lit. The first question is are Indians even portrayed at all? In a lot of books she finds (Babar's World Tour, for example) American Indians are not shown as still living today. We are shown the evidence they left behind, but they have marched into the pages of history.
If there are American Indians in a story, they're often stereotyped or inaccurate representations. In one example, Apache:Girl Warrior, the author even asserts she didn't do that much research to insure accuracy. Rather, she paints a picture of the Apaches as a doomed culture, one that is inevitably going to fall beneath the tide of history.
I am amazed that this level of racism still exists today. Babar's World Tour was published in 2005. That is a sign that we need to think long and hard about how we are exposing our students to American Indians in our classrooms. I liked that Dr. Reese had suggestions for research that can help us be discerning consumers of the information that is available to us.

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian

My favorite aspect of this book was Junior finding an identity for himself. Throughout the book, we see him struggling with different aspects of his life, trying to make them fit into a paradigm of Indianness or Whiteness. He struggles to hide the poverty of his Indian life from his white friends. He struggles to hide his nerdiness from other Indians. But eventually, he begins to see that he can't just be a part of himself when he's around others. By the end of the book, he realizes that he's a part of many different clubs, and that the complexity of his identity is what makes him himself.
It's a way of reaching beyond the dichotomies of race, class, or anything else. To me, it's also a very non-Western way of looking at Identity. Too often, we have to be classified as one thing and one thing only. Right now, we are students or teachers or 20-somethings, but really, we are all of those things at once. When we give up or hide a part of ourselves from others, we are really giving up all of our selves to the pressures of the outside world. But, as Sherman Alexie makes clear, that will never help us understand or fulfill our desires for our life.

Early American Historical Fiction and American Indians

In another one of my classes, we are reading two historical fiction novels from the 1820's. The first is Hobomok by Lydia Child. The second is Hope Leslie by Katharine Sedgwick. Both books focus on the early Colonial period and the English settlers relationship to the Indians.
In Hobomok, a love triangle develops between an English girl, a Wampanoag Indian, and an English man. The girl actually marries the Indian, but only because she's deranged (She thinks the English man has died). However, the English mar returns, and the Indian nobly leaves his English wife so she can be together with her true love. It's an interesting take on the role that Indians could take in the new American society. Basically, if they acted as the settlers wanted them too and helped the settlers out, they could possibly become a a part of society, but only as a second class citizen and only as long as there weren't more English or other Europeans who could take their role.
In Hope Leslie, the story revolves around the trials of the eponymous protagonist. Hope is separated from her sister, who is captured by Indians. This novel is even more harsh to the Indians, in that they can't even be considered a part of European society. All they do is ruin lives by their actions. There is a certain attempt at fair portrayal, but it is obvious that the Indians are savages, and nothing can be done except to make them white.
Overall, it's interesting to look at the history of our national and how we first choose to define ourselves in opposition to the American Indian. Both of these works were concerned with creating a national identity for Americans, and both used American Indians to highlight the "good" aspects of our history.

The Birchbark House

One of the things that really frustrated me about The Birchbark House was the assigning of work based on gender roles. While a true portrayal of the culture, for some reason, I can't get over the fact that the guys didn't really have to do anything. Deydey was never around, except to bring food and some gifts. When he was around, he didn't do anything to help the family. He could sit around and smoke and talk about politics, but he rarely helped to make his wife's life a little easier. And Pinch, he certainly wasn't very helpful. He actually irritated me more because not only was he useless he was insolent as well. His disrespect for his mother and sisters disgusted me, and I got the feeling that he got away with it because he was male. If Pinch had been a little girl, he could have never had the same relationship with his mother and sisters. It's interesting that the same gender relationship existed in some Native American cultures as in the West. The man is the great hunter, but other than that he gets off pretty easy. I wonder what American Indian women today say about the traditional roles assigned to the sexes.

A Legend

John Trudell is an American Indian speaker, writer, poet, activist, and songwriter. He has been working at raising awareness of the unique positions and problems of American Indians for more than 35 years. His activist career began when American Indians took over Alcatraz Island in 1969. Throughout the 70's, he was deeply involved in the American Indian Movement (AIM). The FBI had a file 17,000 pages long based on his subversive activities. In 1979, Trudell burnt a flag on the steps of the FBI Building because he said the government had desecrated the flag and the only way to dispose of it was to burn it. A few days later, his wife and children in a house fire whose cause is still in question today.
After that, Trudell went thru a rough period, but came out of it as a poet and songwriter. He has performed and written since that point, blending spoken word poetry with traditional American Indian music.

What struck me the most about Mr. Trudell was his eloquence on the positions of American Indians. Especially when speaking about the idea that the government is still at war with American Indians, although they no longer use bullets. Instead, they ignore American Indian sovereignty and allow corporations to have the resource rights for cheap. This ties directly into the concepts of the land and sovereignty. His belief in what he says comes through with every word. Also, it was interesting to see how the government reacted when American Indians asked to have treaties honored. It shows that though the treaties are supposedly between equal nations, the federal government is not willing to honor that intention.

Languages, Literatures, and Sovereignty

I found that the land had a profound effect on the issues of language, literature, and sovereignty in American Indian culture. Like in other issues we have looked at, key connections exist between the place American Indians live and how they view the world.
In language, we see that where you live effects the vocabulary you use and the way that you define concepts and metaphors. Also, we see the driving force of metaphor to help define the world around you in ways never considered by Europeans.
In literature, authors choose to write about where they have come from and how that has worked in their formulation of identity and character. Especially in House Made of Dawn, where the protagonist realizes that to make himself better, he must go back to the land he came from. This idea of a tight connection between place and identity is again something that European literature does not consider in the same way.
As for sovereignty, the land is the fundamental question. Do American Indians truly control the land they live on, or are they subordinated to Federal and State Governments? The logical contortions that the Government has gone through with the American Indians makes it difficult to determine. The fundamental tie between American Indians and the land they live on makes it all the more important that the issues is considered and discussed. Some of the ideas that the Federal and State Governments entertain have to complexify and be reanalyzed through a greater understanding of what the land means to American Indians.

What we see

Because of our looking at the American Indians as something that is other than ourselves, we can effectively categorize everything they produce in the same way. Thus a book written by an American Indian is a publication of an American Indian, and must be judged by a set of standards reserved for that group. It falls into that group first, not the group of Literature or of Art. First it must be determined if it is suitable as a product of that culture, and then we can look at its literary or artistic viability.
If we gazed on American Indians and saw something that was similar to ourselves, this would never happen. A book would be a book, but because we see difference when we see American Indians, we change how we view what they produce and are a part of.

Gazing into the world

The intersting thing about the concept of the gaze is how it is so fundamentally tied into Western thought. We do try to categorize, map, and understand every aspect of our lives. So, when the first settlers came to America, gazed on the American Indians, and declared them Savages, it fundamentally effected how they would look on them from that point forward. Besides creating a sense of otherness in the American Indians, it also allowed for the Colonists to feel justified in looking down on American Indian cultures and ideas. The gaze colonizes the American Indians into a people who can never be looked at as equal or even the same as those doing the gazing. They've become a part of the environment, something that has to be dealt with as an obstacle to Western progress.

The Rhetoric of Empire and Our Image of Indians

My most common memories of American Indians, although I realize they are false, are those from old Western movies. The Apache, Commanche, and other Plains tribes were favorites for directors and writers to use to exemplify the "Savage". It makes me laugh to think about the context which we talked about this representation today. It is nothing more than a way to push what we fear about ourselves (as Westerners) on other groups of people. Although the tribes of the plains may have had a strong warrior tradition, that does not mean that they are unthinking monsters who rape, pillage, and destroy. But if we think of them that way, we have a much easier time rationalizing our own agenda. It becomes much easier to kill a group of people and take their land when they are not on a moral par with you. Western movies are just one example of how we have continued to use Colonial discourse to defend our mistreatment and general disrespect of the cultures of American Indians.

The Books of Mausape

For one of my other classes, I'm reading a book called The X-Indian Chronicles: Books of Mausape. I really liked reading the book. It presents the story of 4 friends growing up in NDN City. It's really enjoyable because it's told in a series of separate short stories. Some stories are related to the characters, some are myths, and some are a combination of the two into one. Those are my favorite, when the world of the spirit enters into the real world. Unlike books more in line with Western ideas, there is nothing strange about interacting with spiritual beings in the real world.
It gives one a chance to see a different view of the world. It's a different voice, one that cries out with the joy and pain of being an American Indian. The power of the author's voice is sometimes shocking, sometimes enlightening, but always extraordinarily enjoyable.

Balancing the Scales

I think we often forget just how many American Indians have died due to one cause or another since Europeans have settled here. Like the reading pointed out, we have no sense of American Indians as agents in the struggle between themselves and Europeans. We have a vague idea that they were there, they were doing things, and then they were gone. The tribes are never presented to us as making choices of equal importance to what Europeans were doing. I think it comes from the idea that we already know the ending to the story. The American Indians, to a certain extent, lose. They're overwhelmed and pushed out.
The Western view of history is one fraught with the idea of historical inevitability. We assume that events occurred the way they did to lead us to where we are right now. Thus, we can marginalize the agency of American Indians because what happened to them was what had to occur. We need to give that up. As long as we consider it conscionable to think this way, we can never deal with what happened in our collective past. And if we never work to understand the past, we cheat ourselves of the chance of crafting a better future.